Seedhack creates fertile ground for health and finance apps

The weekend of 23 September saw developers from all over Europe
come to the London Business School to take part in the first ever
Seedhack: an event that aims to bring together designers,
programmers, and businessmen to create software from scratch in
just 48 hours, with the goal of spawning a new batch of
startups.

It was organised by the accelerator company Seedcamp, who mentor
promising startups whilst presenting them to potential investors
around the globe. Throughout the weekend Seedcamp workers taught
participants skills such as how to effectively pitch a project and
how to form a balanced team.

The event kicked off on the Friday with speakers from
organisations such as the NHS, Microsoft, and Facebook talking
about areas in their work that the developers could focus on
improving. They also took the opportunity to show off some of the
exceedingly cool tech they have to play with.

Facebook engineer Simon Cross, exhausted from the previous nights announcement and implementation of
Open Graphs at f8, showed off the ease in which programmers
could strip out, and play with, data from user's profiles. He
demonstrated how, with a few simple search codes, a programmer had
access to a friend's activity on, and off, the site. Developers
could then use this data to create a new site where users would log
in and have, for example, films suggested to them based onwhat
their friends had liked on Facebook and other sites, such as
IMDB.

Matt Ballantine from Microsoft, responding to an article that
ran recently on BBC News, warned the
audience that bespoke software is extremely likely to hit a
project-ruining issue. In many cases, software designed to solve
for multiple problems ends up having to be significantly
redesigned, or scrapped entirely, so it's often better to aim
small, and address a single issue, than create an all-encompassing
solution.

The most interesting talk from Richard Stubbs of the NHS. He
laid out the in-house difficulties the NHS has in adopting new
technology -- it needs new systems that are in line with modern
technology. It's rare to hear heads of industry publicly
acknowledge their internal flaws.

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, founder of Patients Know Best, explained how the NHS had
shifted its focus to simple direct apps that patients could use.
Previously, the NHS had tried implementing software to be used
nationwide, but the problem was that by the time it was in doctor's
hands it would be out of date and not specific enough to suit their
needs. Their talk echoed the Ballantine's warning of bespoke
software from earlier that evening.

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Creating apps for patients, instead of doctors, avoids much of
the red tape that comes with internal implementation. Al-Abaydli
said that he'd found that patients will use the best software for
the job, and will adopt these apps much faster than the doctors.
This approach better complements the healthcare system's fragmented
structure. So, the NHS has put out a call for developers to submit
small programs that solve specific problems.

One development duo presented a piece of software on Sunday that
was inspired by this "aim small" approach. Their software,
TribeShot, was built to reduce the number of missed appointments
and replace the current SMS notification system. Currently,
30 percent of all UK medical appointments are missed, resulting in
wasted time and money. Reducing the number of missed appointments
by just one percent could save the NHS millions of pounds every
year.

TribeShot phones a patient 24 hours before their appointment and
asks them if they're still able to attend. While the current SMS
system can be easily ignored, TribeShot requires a response, giving
the receptionist feedback on whether a patient plans to make the
appointment. It also acts as a reminder, and provides a means of
on-the-spot cancellation.

The system was built and working by the pitch on Sunday, and the
developers plan to take it forward to try and get it adopted by the
NHS.

Besides healthcare, there was also a focus on finance -- perhaps
inspired by the event's business school setting. One project,
CredStream, uses social media scraping to allow banks to predict
whether one of their investments is about to suffer financial
difficulty. The program offered credit ratings in minutes, in
contrast with the current market competitors' timescale of
months.

The attendants all seemed to have gained from the weekend -- one
exuberant developer said "I've learned more in 48 hours than the
whole of my college education." There's talk of other Seedhacks
taking place in the near future, possibly as soon as November 2011,
so be on the look-out for details.

If you're interested in learning more about the event, and
hearing about any future Seedhacks, then head on over to seedcamp.com/topics/seedhack.